The respective inventors, and the assignee of the present application, have endeavored to develop a wide variety of different sorting assemblies which may be utilized to sort given objects of interest and particularly row crops of various types so as to identify defective products during the processing of same. As might be understood from even a casual review of the prior art, various food processors, and others, have continued to look for innovative ways to process large amounts of food products without the intervention of manual labor.
The prior art is replete with various sorter designs which are employed to image mass flow food products, detect defective product(s), and then remove the defective product(s) from the food product stream. All these designs have operated with varying degrees of success. However, they all have shortcomings which have detracted from their usefulness. For example, one of the shortcomings attendant with the prior art designs is that larger row crops, like ears of corn, are not readily processed using the high speed techniques and assemblies associated with many of the prior art teachings. In view of the size of the product, and its non-uniform shape, the prior art assemblies utilized for other mass flow food products such as what would be useful with peas, beans, peanuts and the like, are not useful with whole ears of corn, for example. Moreover, the ejection mechanisms employed with lightweight food products such as peas and beans and other similar row crops are not effective with a larger food product, such as an ear of corn. In addition to the foregoing, many of the prior art sorting devices have a relatively large factory footprint and are quite costly to install at existing manufacturing facilities.
Therefore, a sorting apparatus which avoids the shortcomings attendant with the prior art assemblies and practices which were utilized heretofore is the subject matter of the present invention.